INCITS Biometrics Workload Drives Formation of Four New Groups

INCITS Biometrics Workload Drives Formation of Four New GroupsDemand for Biometrics Standards Soars Due to Heightened Security, ID Theft Concerns

Washington, D.C. April 3, 2003 - The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) announced today that it has launched four new Task Groups to handle increased activity in biometrics. The Task Groups are part of INCITS Technical Committee M1, formed in November 2001, which currently has 55 organizational members from business, government, and academia.

"National and international biometric standards are urgently needed in order to accelerate the deployment of new information technology systems for homeland security and for the prevention of identity theft. These standards will support significantly better, open systems standards-based security solutions. The standards that will be developed under the INCITS M1 Tasks Groups will also support other government and commercial applications based on biometric personal authentication," said Fernando Podio, chair of INCITS Technical Committee M1. Podio is a member of the Convergent Information Systems Division of the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

"All interested parties are welcome to participate as voting members in the Task Groups when they begin meeting this quarter," noted Kate McMillan, Senior Director of the INCITS Secretariat, which is sponsored by The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI).

The purview of the four Task Groups and scheduled meeting times are as follows:

M1.1, the Task Group on Biometric Data Interchange Formats, chaired by Creed Jones, Sagem Morpho Inc, will focus on the standardization of the content, meaning and representation of biometric data interchange formats. Currently, assigned projects are

Finger Pattern Based Interchange Format,

Finger Minutiae Format for Data Interchange,

Face Recognition Format for Data Interchange,

Iris Interchange Format,

Finger Image Based Interchange Format, and

Signature/Sign Image Based Interchange Format.

The initial meeting of M1.1 will be a teleconference scheduled for April 21. The second meeting will be held June 9 -10 in Seattle, WA and hosted by SAFLINK Corp.

M1.2, the Task Group on Biometric Technical Interfaces, chaired by Fred Herr, ID Technology Partners, will cover the standardization of all necessary interfaces and interactions between biometric components and sub-systems, including the possible use of security mechanisms to protect stored data and data transferred between systems. M1.2 will also consider the need for a reference model for the architecture and operation of biometric systems in order to identify the standards that are needed to support multi-vendor systems and their applications. The first meeting will be held June 9 in Seattle, WA and hosted by SAFLINK.

M1.3, the Task Group on Biometric Profiles, chaired by Fernando Podio, NIST will begin its work with the following Application Profile projects:

Interoperability and Data Interchange - Biometric Based Verification and Identification of Transportation Workers

The initial meeting of M1.3 will be held June 10-11 in Seattle, WA and hosted by SAFLINK.

M1.4 is the Task Group on Biometric Performance Testing and Reporting and is chaired by Ron Sutton, Lockheed Martin, Inc. It will handle the standardization of biometric performance metric definitions and calculations, approaches to test performance and requirements for reporting the results of these tests. M1.4 will begin its work with an approved project on Biometric Performance Testing and Reporting. The initial meeting of M1.4 will be held June 11, 2003 in Seattle, WA and hosted by SAFLINK.

About INCITS INCITS (www.incits.org) ) is the primary U.S. focus of standardization in the field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) encompassing storage, processing, transfer, display, management, organization, and retrieval of information. As such, INCITS also serves as the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) Technical Advisory Group for ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. JTC 1 is responsible for International standardization in the field of information technology. INCITS is accredited by ANSI and operates under its rules, designed to ensure that voluntary standards are developed by the consensus of directly and materially affected interests.

From 1997-2001, INCITS operated under the name Accredited Standards Committee NCITS, National Committee for Information Technology Standards. From 1961- 1996, NCITS operated under the name Accredited Standards Committee X3, Information Technology.